Story #24: You Should Always Try, or--Chag Purim Sameach!

On the way home, I was feeling badly for myself. Not even the normal, natural, "I kinda had a crummy day" feeling badly but real, full-on, "Whoa, if I don't show some serious self-control I'm about 30 seconds away from being That Girl who cries on BART" feeling badly.

It was a combination of lots of things: finding myself for the first time in eight years without a Purim costume and away from a raucous Jewish day school holiday carnival celebrating the triumph of Queen Esther, worrying about when my pink slip will come in the mail, second-guessing a relationship decision I made over the weekend, spending all day in chilly itchy school clothes when all I wanted was a pair of big jeans and my cozy Stanford sweatshirt, and...maybe more than anything else, in that moment at least, not having any hamentaschen.

Now this might not sound serious, and if that is the case all it means is that you have not had the privilege of experiencing this magnificent delicacy. To save space I will not wax educational about hamentaschen and their praises here, but do I invite you to learn about them on wikipedia.

Purim kind of snuck up on me this year and without having 20 families' worth of Jewish moms generously showering me with plastic bags full of homemade hat-shaped goodness in all flavors of the spectrum (note to anyone paying attention: I like apricot the best) I just didn't know how to get my fix. I realized about lunchtime that my cookie craving was not abating but rather growing stronger and so I called the Grand Bakery in Oakland.

"How late are you open?" I wanted to know.

"Six o'clock and not a minute later, I've got some business to conduct with my bottle of etrog vodka from last Sukkot," the man who answered the phone informed me.

"I'll be there in plenty of time," I promised earnestly. "How's the inventory holding up?" I was worried demand would outstrip supply.

"HA! Just wait 'til you see when you get here--we'll have, don't worry," the baker said in no uncertain terms before hanging up the phone.

But, it all went downhill from there. My 3:00-4:00 meeting after school went until 4:30. Afterward I hustled to Civic Center BART only to race down the stairs and see the Richmond train pulling away from the platform. I finally got on the Pittsburg train 12 minutes later and there was a switching problem between West Oakland and 12th Street which left us in a weird, precariously roller-coaster style position waiting on the tracks above Peralta in Oakland with nothing visible below in the form of tracks or a platform, only laundry flapping in the cold wind.

I raced up the escalator and out to the bus stop on Broadway across from the Paramount Theatre, just to see the #12 bus pulling away and the last warm square of sunlight fading from the sidewalk. Standing chilly and crabby against the Kaiser Permanente building there on the corner of 20th, I was faux-reading my book and trying to understand how I came to feel so upset about all of this when a man walked up to me, RIGHT up and wrapped his arms around me pulling me into a surprising hug-kiss combo. At first I thought my day was getting worse because I was being attacked, albeit with affection, right there in broad-yet-shrinking daylight but actually it was my friend Jordan headed to the Y a few blocks away. "Kotleba!" he said with a smile. "I thought that was you standing here!"

He doesn't know it but Jordan and I met at a very complicated time, about a year ago, when I was trying everything I could to pull off the second half of my sabbatical. We became acquainted through the professional Jewish community and he was part of a process I went through to try and make it possible to spend three months building a school in a refugee camp in Ghana. His organization was really my last ditch effort, he was my Obi Wan Kenobi but I just couldn't make it come together and after having tried what seemed to be everything I did not go to Africa after all. I stayed home, I began to make a new home for myself and that is perhaps how I learned what ended up being some of the most revolutionary lessons that came from those sixteen months.

It was a 45-second conversation today, between Jordan and I, and it might seem silly to ascribe so much power to that one chance meeting, but it reminded me of something I had forgotten on this chilly itchy worrisome day: I have way more power than I remember, a lot of the time. And if I just try, even if it seems like it's not working out in the moment, my powers will always come through for me.

Buoyed as I was by this reminder, I decided that I was going to turn my day around and make it to the Grand Bakery by 6 o'clock after all. I boarded the #12 bus at 5:45, got off at my house six minutes later, ran around the corner and jumped into the car I've found myself wondering lately if it's really worth having, and tore up Grand Avenue towards the movie theater. I drove past the bakery and took a big risk by not turning into that little tease of a municipal parking lot that always seems like it will have a spot but never does, and immediately past the crosswalk there was a spot on the street. I pulled in and jumped out, wallet in hand, racing up the street first the wrong direction in my haste and then the right one. I saw with the delight that the stacking plastic chairs, identical to the ones found at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, were still out on the sidewalk and I ran completely unapologetically into the bakery.

"You...have...no...idea...how...glad...I...am...you're...still...open..." I panted, leaning on the counter and unwinding my damp scarf from my sweaty neck.

"Oh, hey, did you call earlier? You said you'd be here by six, right? Nice work," the baker smiled, seated by the cash register, the earlier holiday rush long since over. "What can I get you?"

I ordered my long-awaited hamentaschen, half a dozen apricot and half a dozen cherry, which he pulled boxed and ready to go from the promised massive cookie trove in the window. They were $1.10 each or $12 for a dozen. How could I resist? I ordered one lone prune-flavored cookie, loose in a white wax paper bakery bag, to round out the assortment and as the young woman was ringing me up the baker made me an end-of-the day offer.

"Free cookie if you can name the artist and song," he said, jabbing his thumb at the radio perched above the door to the kitchen.

"Oh, I'm not much one for music," I replied, embarrassed since I could tell the singer was well-known and that I should be able to identify him. "I'm really just happy that I made it here in time, you have no idea how hard I tried to get here--I came from the city and rode the #12 bus from BART and then jumped in my car along the way because I was worried I wouldn't make it in time."

"Whoa, that's pretty impressive!" the baker nodded as the woman counted out my change. "You deserve some kind of special treat for that much effort. Come on--smaller free cookie if you can just tell me who the singer is."

I thought of my brother because I know Nathan does an imitation of this guy and his drowsy, wheezy tone but let's face it--I'd had quite an afternoon and now standing in the Grand Bakery at 6:02 p.m. on Purim, cookies finally in hand, was just not up for playing games. "I'm really sorry, I can tell he's famous but I just don't know his name."

The baker laughed. "His name is Bob Dylan," he said by way of explanation. "He only has the single most-imitated style in Western music."

As the woman who won the Oscar-predicting poll at Sage and Emily's last month but then couldn't identify Robert DeNiro when he came on stage, I had to laugh at myself. "Oh well," I said as I walked out the door, calling back over my shoulder to the baker. "Purim Sameach--I hope you had a happy holiday!" Walking back to the car, balancing my plastic bakery boxes, I smiled to myself with the realization that as confusing as the past days and weeks might have been it seems I still have my power to always pull something off after all.

And now here I sit on my couch, having had all kinds of plans for a dinner of soup and kale and baked potatoes. Instead it is almost one in the morning and I realize that as soon as I came home, put on my longed-for comfy clothes and ate my after-school snack of three types of hamentaschen I must have fallen asleep right in this very spot. I think at the end of a day like this one that might have been exactly what I needed.